Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits

Summary

The book is Nietzsche's first in the aphoristic style that would come to dominate his writings, discussing a variety of concepts in short paragraphs or sayings. Reflecting an admiration of Voltaire as a free thinker, but also a break in his friendship with composer Richard Wagner two years earlier.

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Human, All Too Human - Friedrich Nietzsche

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PREFACE

Often enough, and always with great consternation, people have told me that there is something distinctive in all my writings, from The Birth of Tragedy to the most recently published Prologue to a Philosophy of the Future2. All of them, I have been told, contain snares and nets for careless birds, and an almost constant, unperceived challenge to reverse one’s habitual estimations and esteemed habits. What’s that? Everything is only—human, all too human? With such a sigh one comes from my writings, they say, with a kind of wariness and distrust even toward morality, indeed tempted and encouraged in no small way to become the spokesman for the worst things: might they perhaps be only the best slandered? My writings have been called a School for Suspicion, even more for Contempt, fortunately also for Courage and, in fact, for Daring. Truly, I myself do not believe that anyone has ever looked into the world with such deep suspicion, and not only as an occasional devil’s advocate, but every bit as much, to speak theologically, as an enemy and challenger of God. Whoever guesses something of the consequences of any deep suspicion, something of the chills and fears stemming from isolation, to which every man burdened with an unconditional difference of viewpoint is condemned, this person will understand how often I tried to take shelter somewhere, to recover from myself, as if to forget myself entirely for a time (in some sort of reverence, or enmity, or scholarliness, or frivolity, or stupidity); and he will also understand why, when I could not find what I needed, I had to gain it by force artificially, to counterfeit it, or create it poetically. (And what have poets ever done otherwise? And why else do we have all the art in the world?) What I always needed most to cure and restore myself, however, was the belief that I was not the only one to be thus, to see thus—I needed the enchanting intuition of kinship and equality in the eye and in desire, repose in a trusted friendship; I needed a shared blindness, with no suspicion or question marks, a pleasure in foregrounds, surfaces, what is near, what is nearest, in everything that has color, skin, appearance. Perhaps one could accuse me in this regard of some sort of art, various sorts of finer counterfeiting: for example, that I had deliberately and willfully closed my eyes to Schopenhauer’s blind will to morality,3 at a time when I was already clear-sighted enough about morality; similarly, that I had deceived myself about Richard Wagner’s incurable romanticism,4 as if it were a beginning and not an end; similarly, about the Greeks; similarly about the Germans and their future—and there might be a whole long list of such Similarly’s. But even if this all were true and I were accused of it with good reason, what do you know, what could you know about the amount of self-preserving cunning, of reason and higher protection that is contained in such self-deception—and how much falseness I still require so that I may keep permitting myself the luxury of my truthfulness?

Enough, I am still alive; and life has not been devised by morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception—but wouldn’t you know it? Here I am, beginning again, doing what I have always done, the old immoralist and birdcatcher, I am speaking immorally, extra-morally, beyond good and evil:

1. In the place of this preface to the 1886 edition, the 1878 edition of Human All Too Human included a quotation from René Descartes’s Discourse on Method

2. The Birth Of Tragedy was published in 1872, Prologue to a Philosophy of the Future is the subtitle of Beyond Good and Evil, published in 1886

3. In Schopenhauer as Educator(1874). For Nietzsche’s later response to Schopenhauer’s blind will to morality, see especially Aphorism 39.

Thus I invented, when I needed them, the free spirits5 too, to whom this heavyhearted – stouthearted6 book with the title Human, All Too Human is dedicated. There are no such free spirits, were none—but, as I said, I needed their company at the time, to be of good cheer in the midst of bad things (illness, isolation, foreignness, sloth, inactivity); as brave fellows and specters to chat and laugh with, when one feels like chatting and laughing, and whom one sends to hell when they get boring—as reparation for lacking friends. That there could someday be such free spirits, that our Europe will have such lively, daring fellows among its sons of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, real and palpable and not merely, as in my case, phantoms and a hermit’s shadow play: I am the last person to want to doubt that. I already see them coming, slowly, slowly; and perhaps I am doing something to hasten their coming when I describe before the fact the fateful conditions that I see giving rise to them, the paths on which I see them coming?

5. die freien Geister

6. schwermütig-mutig

It may be conjectured that the decisive event for a spirit in whom the type of the free spirit is one day to ripen to sweet perfection has been a great separation,7 and that before it, he was probably all the more a bound spirit, and seemed to be chained forever to his corner, to his post. What binds most firmly? Which cords can almost not be torn? With men of a high and select type, it will be their obligations: that awe which befits the young, their diffidence and delicacy before all that is time-honored and dignified, their gratitude for the ground out of which they grew, for the hand that led them, for the shrine where they learned to worship—their own highest moments will bind them most firmly and oblige them most lastingly. For such bound people the great separation comes suddenly, like the shock of an earthquake: all at once the young soul is devastated, torn loose, torn out—it itself does not know what is happening. An urge, a pressure governs it, mastering the soul like a command: the will and wish awaken to go away, anywhere, at any cost: a violent, dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world flames up and flickers in all the senses. Better to die than live here, so sounds the imperious and seductive voice. And this here, this at home is everything which it had loved until then! A sudden horror and suspicion of that which it loved; a lightning flash of contempt toward that which was its obligation; a rebellious, despotic, volcanically jolting desire to roam abroad, to become alienated, cool, sober, icy: a hatred of love, perhaps a desecratory reaching and glancing backward, to where it had until then worshiped and loved; perhaps a blush of shame at its most recent act, and at the same time, jubilation that it was done; a drunken, inner, jubilant shudder, which betrays a victory-a victory? over what? over whom? a puzzling, questioning, questionable victory, but the first victory nevertheless: such bad and painful things are part of the history of the great separation. It is also a disease that can destroy man, this first outburst of strength and will to self-determination, self-valorization, this will to free will: and how much disease is expressed by the wild attempts and peculiarities with which the freed man, the separated man, now tries to prove his rule over things! He wanders about savagely with an unsatisfied lust; his booty must atone for the dangerous tension of his pride; he rips apart what attracts him.8 With an evil laugh he overturns what he finds concealed, spared until then by some shame; he investigates how these things look if they are overturned. There is some arbitrariness and pleasure in arbitrariness to it, if he then perhaps directs his favor to that which previously stood in disrepute—if he creeps curiously and enticingly around what is most forbidden. Behind his ranging activity (for he is journeying restlessly and aimlessly, as in a desert) stands the question mark of an ever more dangerous curiosity. Cannot all values be overturned? And is Good perhaps Evil? And God only an invention, a nicety of the devil? Is everything perhaps ultimately false? And if we are deceived, are we not for that very reason also deceivers? Must we not be deceivers, too? Such thoughts lead and mislead9 him, always further onward, always further away. Loneliness surrounds him, curls round him, ever more threatening, strangling, heart-constricting, that fearful goddess and mater saeva cupidinum10—but who today knows what loneliness is?

7. Loslösung

8. er zerreist was ihn reitzt

9. führen und verführen ihn

10. wild mother of the passions

It is still a long way from this morbid isolation, from the desert of these experimental years, to that enormous, overflowing certainty and health which cannot do without even illness itself, as an instrument and fishhook of knowledge; to that mature freedom of the spirit which is fully as much self-mastery and discipline of the heart, and which permits paths to many opposing ways of thought. It is a long way to the inner spaciousness and cosseting of a superabundance which precludes the danger that the spirit might lose itself on its own paths and fall in love and stay put, intoxicated, in some nook; a long way to that. excess of vivid healing, reproducing, reviving powers, the very sign of great health, an excess that gives the free spirit the dangerous privilege of being permitted to live experimentally and to offer himself to adventure: the privilege of the master free spirit! In between may lie long years of convalescence, years full of multicolored, painful magical transformations, governed and led by a tough will to health which already often dares to dress and disguise11 itself as health. There is a middle point on the way, which a man having such a fate cannot remember later without being moved: a pale, fine light and sunny happiness are characteristic of it, a feeling of a birdlike freedom, birdlike perspective, birdlike arrogance, some third thing in which curiosity and a tender contempt are united. A free spirit—this cool term is soothing in that state, almost warming. No longer chained down by hatred and love, one lives without Yes, without No, voluntarily near, voluntarily far, most preferably slipping away, avoiding, fluttering on, gone again, flying upward again; one is spoiled, like anyone who has ever seen an enormous multiplicity beneath him—and one becomes the antithesis of those who trouble themselves about things that do not concern them. Indeed, now the free spirit concerns himself only with things (and how many there are!) which no longer trouble him.

11. zu kleiden und zu verkleiden

Another step onward in convalescence. The free spirit again approaches life, slowly, of course, almost recalcitrantly, almost suspiciously. It grows warmer around him again, yellower, as it were; feeling and fellow-feeling gain depth; mild breezes of all kinds pass over him. He almost feels as if his eyes were only now open to what is near. He is amazed and sits motionless: where had he been, then? These near and nearest things, how they seem to him transformed! What magical fluff they have acquired in the meantime! He glances backward gratefully—grateful to his travels, to his severity and self-alienation, to his far-off glances and bird flights into cold heights. How good that he did not stay at home,with himself the whole time, like a dull, pampered loafer! He was beside himself: there is no doubt about that. Only now does he see himself—and what surprises he finds there! What untried terrors! What happiness even in weariness, in the old illness, in the convalescent’s relapses! How he likes to sit still, suffering, spinning patience, or to lie in the sun! Who understands as he does the happiness of winter, the sun spots on the wall! They are the most grateful animals in the world, the most modest, too, these convalescents and squirrels, turned halfway back to life again—there are those among them who let no day pass without hanging a little song of praise on its trailing hem. And to speak seriously, all pessimism (the inveterate evil of old idealists and liars, as we know) is thoroughly cured by falling ill in the way these free spirits do, staying ill for a good while, and then, for even longer, even longer, becoming healthy—I mean healthier. There is wisdom, practical wisdom in it, when over a long period of time even health itself is administered only in small doses.

About that time it may finally happen, among the sudden illuminations of a still turbulent, still changeable state of health, that the free spirit, ever freer, begins to unveil the mystery of that great separation which until then had waited impenetrable, questionable, almost unapproachable in his memory. Perhaps for a long time he hardly dared ask himself, Why so apart, so alone? Renouncing everything I admired, even admiration? Why this severity, this suspicion, this hatred of one’s own virtues? But now he dares to ask it loudly, and already hears something like an answer. You had to become your own master, and also the master of your own virtues. Previously, your virtues were your masters; but they must be nothing more than your tools, along with your other tools. You had to gain power over your For and Against, and learn how to hang them out or take them in, according to your higher purpose. You had to learn that all estimations have a perspective, to learn the displacement, distortion, apparent teleology of horizons, and whatever else is part of perspective; also the bit of stupidity in regard to opposite values and all the intellectual damage that every For or Against exacts in payment. You had to learn to grasp the necessary injustice in every For and Against; to grasp that injustice is inseparable from life, that life itself is determined by perspective and its injustice. Above all you had to see clearly wherever injustice is greatest, where life is developed least, most narrowly, meagerly, rudimentarily, and yet cannot help taking itself as the purpose and measure of things, and for the sake of its preservation picking at and questioning secretly and pettily and incessantly what is higher, greater, and richer. You had to see clearly the problem of hierarchy, and how power and justice and breadth of perspective grow upward together. You had to—. Enough, now the free spirit knows which thou shalt he has obeyed, and also what he now can do, what he only now is permitted to do.

That is how the free spirit answers himself about that mystery of separation and he ends by generalizing his case, to decide thus about his experience. As it happened to me, he tells himself, so must it happen to everyone in whom a task wants to take form and `come into the world.’ The secret power and necessity of this task will hold sway within and among his various destinies like an unsuspected pregnancy, long before he has looked the task itself in the eye or knows its name. Our destiny commands us, even when we do not yet know what it is; it is the future which gives the rule to our present. Granted that it is the problem of hierarchy which we may call our problem, we free spirits; only now, in the noonday of our lives, do we understand what preparations, detours, trials, temptations, disguises, were needed before the problem was permitted to rise up before us. We understand how we first had to experience the most numerous and contradictory conditions of misery and happiness in our bodies and souls, as adventurers and circumnavigators of that inner world which is called human being, as surveyors of every higher and one above the other which is likewise called human being, penetrating everywhere, almost without fear, scorning nothing, losing nothing, savoring everything, cleaning and virtually straining off everything of the coincidental—until we finally could say, we free spirits: Here is a new problem! Here is a long ladder on whose rungs we ourselves have sat and climbed, and which we ourselves were at one time! Here is a Higher, a Deeper, a Below-us, an enormous long ordering, a hierarchy which we see: here—is our problem!

No psychologist or soothsayer will have a moment’s difficulty in discovering at which place in the development sketched out above the present book belongs (or is placed). But where are there psychologists today? In France, certainly; perhaps in Russia; surely not in Germany. There are sufficient reasons for which the present-day Germans could esteem it an honor to be such; bad enough for a person who is constituted and has become un-German in this respect! This German book, which has known how to find its readers in a wide circle of countries and peoples (it has been on the road for approximately ten years), which must understand some kind of music and flute playing to seduce even unreceptive foreign ears to listen—precisely in Germany has this book been read most negligently, heard most poorly. What is the cause? It demands too much, has been the reply, it addresses itself to men who do not know the hardship of crude obligations; it demands fine, cosseted senses; it needs superfluity, superfluity of time, of bright heavens and hearts, of otium12 in the boldest sense—all good things which we Germans of today do not have and therefore cannot give. After such a polite answer, my philosophy counsels me to be silent and inquire no further, especially since in certain cases, as the saying suggests, one remains a philosopher only by—being silent.13

SECTION ONE

OF FIRST AND LAST THINGS1

1

Chemistry of concepts and feelings. In almost all respects, philosophical problems today are again formulated as they were two thousand years ago: how can something arise from its opposite—for example, reason from unreason, sensation from the lifeless, logic from the illogical, disinterested contemplation from covetous desire, altruism from egoism, truth from error? Until now, metaphysical philosophy has overcome this difficulty by denying the origin of the one from the other, and by assuming for the more highly valued things some miraculous origin, directly from out of the heart and essence of the thing in itself.2 Historical philosophy, on the other hand, the very youngest of all philosophical methods, which can no longer be even conceived of as separate from the natural sciences, has determined in isolated cases (and will probably conclude in all of them) that they are not opposites, only exaggerated to be so by the popular or metaphysical view, and that this opposition is based on an error of reason. As historical philosophy explains it, there exists, strictly considered, neither a selfless act nor a completely disinterested observation: both are merely sublimations. In them the basic element appears to be virtually dispersed and proves to be present only to the most careful observer.

All we need, something which can be given us only now, with the various sciences at their present level of achievement, is a chemistry of moral, religious, aesthetic ideas and feelings, a chemistry of all those impulses that we ourselves experience in the great and small interactions of culture and society, indeed even in solitude. What if this chemistry might end with the conclusion that, even here, the most glorious colors are extracted from base, even despised substances? Are there many who will want to pursue such investigations? Mankind loves to put the questions of origin and beginnings out of mind: must one not be almost inhuman to feel in himself the opposite inclination?

1. Last Things (die letzten Dinge) refers to eschatology.

2. Ding an sich: the thing in itself, in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), refers to the existent as it exists independently of our knowledge; a noumenon, a thing of the mind rather than of the senses; that which a thing is when there is no human perception of it, i.e., when it is in essence rather than in appearance.

2

Congenital defect of philosophers. All philosophers suffer from the same defect, in that they start with present-day man and think they can arrive at their goal by analyzing him. Instinctively they let man hover before them as an aeterna veritas,3 something unchanging in all turmoil, a secure measure of things. But everything the philosopher asserts about man is basically no more than a statement about man within a very limited time span. A lack of historical sense is the congenital defect of all philosophers. Some unwittingly even take the most recent form of man, as it developed under the imprint of certain religions or even certain political events, as the fixed form from which one must proceed. They will not understand that man has evolved, that the faculty of knowledge has also evolved, while some of them even permit themselves to spin the whole world from out of this faculty of knowledge.

Now, everything essential in human development occurred in primeval times, long before those four thousand years with which we are more or less familiar. Man probably hasn’t changed much more in these years. But the philosopher sees instincts in present-day man, and assumes that they belong to the unchangeable facts of human nature, that they can, to that extent, provide a key to the understanding of the world in general. This entire teleology is predicated on the ability to speak about man of the last four thousand years as if he were eternal, the natural direction of all things in the world from the beginning. But everything has evolved; there are no eternal facts, nor are there any absolute truths. Thus historical philosophizing is necessary henceforth, and the virtue of modesty as well.

3. eternal truth

3

Esteeming humble truths. It is the sign of a higher culture to esteem more highly the little, humble truths, those discovered by a strict method, rather than the gladdening and dazzling errors that originate in metaphysical and artistic ages and men. At first, one has scorn on his lips for humble truths, as if they could offer no match for the others: they stand so modest, simple, sober, even apparently discouraging, while the other truths are so beautiful, splendid, enchanting, or even enrapturing. But truths that are hard won, certain, enduring, and therefore still of consequence for all further knowledge are the higher; to keep to them is manly, and shows bravery, simplicity, restraint. Eventually, not only the individual, but all mankind will be elevated to this manliness, when men finally grow accustomed to the greater esteem for durable, lasting knowledge and have lost all belief in inspiration and a seemingly miraculous communication of truths.

The admirers of forms,4 with their standard of beauty and sublimity, will, to be sure, have good reason to mock at first, when esteem for humble truths and the scientific spirit first comes to rule, but only because either their eye has not yet been opened to the charm of the simplest form, or because men raised in that spirit have not yet been fully and inwardly permeated by it, so that they continue thoughtlessly to imitate old forms (and poorly, too, like someone who no longer really cares about the matter). Previously, the mind was not obliged to think rigorously; its importance lay in spinning out symbols and forms. That has changed; that importance of symbols has become the sign of lower culture. Just as our very arts are becoming ever more intellectual and our senses more spiritual, and as, for example, that which is sensually pleasant to the ear is judged quite differently now than a hundred years ago, so the forms of our life become ever more spiritual—to the eye of older times uglier, perhaps, but only because it is unable to see how the realm of internal, spiritual beauty is continually deepening and expanding, and to what extent a glance full of intelligence can mean more to all of us now than the most beautiful human body and the most sublime edifice.

4. Artists and aesthetes, as opposed to scientists.

4

Astrology and the like. It is probable that the objects of religious, moral, and aesthetic sensibility likewise belong only to the surface of things, although man likes to believe that here at least he is touching the heart of the world. Because those things make him so deeply happy or unhappy, he deceives himself, and shows the same pride as astrology, which thinks the heavens revolve around the fate of man. The moral man, however, presumes that that which is essential to his heart must also be the heart and essence of all things.

5

Misunderstanding dreams. In ages of crude, primordial cultures, man thought he could come to know a second real world in dreams: this is the origin of all metaphysics. Without dreams man would have found no occasion to divide the world. The separation into body and soul is also connected to the oldest views about dreams, as is the assumption of a spiritual apparition5 that is, the origin of all belief in ghosts, and probably also in gods. The dead man lives on, because he appears to the living man in dreams. So man concluded formerly, throughout many thousands of years.

5. Seelenscheinleib, Nietzsche’s neologism.

6

The scientific spirit is powerful in the part, not in the whole. The distinct, smallest fields of science are treated purely objectively. On the other hand, the general, great sciences, taken as a whole, pose the question (a very unobjective question, to be sure): what for? to what benefit? Because of this concern about benefit, men treat the sciences less impersonally as a whole than in their parts. Now, in philosophy—the top of the whole scientific pyramid—the question of the benefit of knowledge itself is posed automatically and each philosophy has the unconscious intention of ascribing to knowledge the greatest benefit. For this reason, all philosophies have so much high-flying metaphysics and so much wariness of the seemingly insignificant explanations of physics. For the importance of knowledge for life ought to appear as great as possible. Here we have the antagonism between individual scientific fields and philosophy. The latter, like art, wishes to render the greatest possible depth and meaning to life and activity. In the sciences, one seeks knowledge and nothing more—whatever the consequences may be. Until now, there has been no philosopher in whose hands philosophy has not become an apology for knowledge. In this way, at least, every one is an optimist, by thinking that knowledge must be accorded the highest usefulness. All philosophers are tyrannized by logic: and logic, by its nature, is optimism.

7

The troublemaker in science. Philosophy divorced itself from science when it inquired which knowledge of the world and life could help man to live most happily. This occurred in the Socratic schools: out of a concern for happiness man tied off the veins of scientific investigation-and does so still today.

8

Pneumatic explanation of nature. Metaphysics explains nature’s scriptures as if pneumatically, the way the church and its scholars used to explain the Bible. It takes a lot of intelligence to apply to nature the same kind of strict interpretive art that philologists today have created for all books: with the intention simply to understand what the scripture wants to say, but not to sniff out, or even presume, a double meaning. Just as we have by no means overcome bad interpretive art

This is the first work of philosophy I read, having been advised to begin with Nietzsche as a beginner reader. Beginner philosophy or not, I think this book was terrific and I related with Nietzsche on many of the things he was saying. In it, Nietzsche discusses his views on Christianity, the creation of a free thinker, his concept of a higher culture, among many other things. I would recommend this book to anyone looking to get into philosophy. It certainly served to cement my interest in it and to pursue further works of his.